1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally involves a new order type for the trading of financial securities products (e.g., equity shares of stock in a company or corporation).
2. Description of the Background
In the United States, securities are generally traded on national securities exchanges or over-the-counter (e.g., on alternative trading systems (“ATSs”), including electronic communication networks (“ECNs”), and/or internally by broker-dealers). These trading centers may be floor-based or manual (e.g., an exchange trading floor with specialists and/or market-makers), electronic (e.g., an automated trading system that matches buy and sell orders) or a hybrid of both (e.g., an exchange that has a physical trading floor and an automated system that matches orders).
Orders to buy/sell securities are typically market orders or limit orders that indicate, among other things, the name/symbol of security to be bought/sold, the number of shares (i.e., order size) and possibly a maximum purchase/sale price (i.e., limit price) (solely in the case of limit orders), which may require a trading center to publicly display such orders.
Market participants (e.g., exchanges, ATSs/ECNs, broker-dealers and/or clients of broker-dealers (in some instances)) may send buy/sell orders to a trading center to be matched with sell/buy orders in a particular security or securities and receive one or more executions. Based on the terms of an order, a trading center receiving the order may be required to publicly display such order before it can receive an execution. The display of its order would alert the general public to the market participant's willingness to buy/sell a certain number of shares of a particular security at a specific price and could potentially convey the market participant's trading strategy and/or cause the market for the security to move drastically depending on the size and price of the order. In these types of cases, it may be disadvantageous for a market participant to have its order displayed in this manner.